Excursions

Mac mini lives. Or is it that it is reborn? Whatever the case, it makes Apple put a lot of push behind it. And thankfully they didn’t go for something cute. Keep it focused at what it is good at. #AppleEvent 👍🏽

Retweets prey on users’ worst instincts. They delude Twitter users into thinking that they’re contributing to thoughtful discourse by endlessly amplifying other people’s points—the digital equivalent of shouting “yeah, what they said” in the midst of an argument. And because Twitter doesn’t allow for editing tweets, information that goes viral via retweets is also more likely to be false or exaggerated. According to MIT research published in the journal Science, Twitter users retweet fake news almost twice as much as real news. Other Twitter users, desperate for validation, endlessly retweet their own tweets, spamming followers with duplicate information.

This is exactly the reason Twitter needs to eliminate retweet feature first — a lot before their proposed killing of the like button. It doesn’t matter how valuable the retweet option is as a signal to Twitter’s algorithm. It has for long been exploited to make it a hostile platform for every voice that should matter. And it needs to disappear first.

I wish I understood the compression and streaming of audio better to understand why some form of audio (for example, episodes of a podcast) sound choppy over Bluetooth and others don’t. I am sure @marcoarment could go on and on explaining the reasons, but this just baffles me.

I have observed significant reduction in the time for the posts to appear on the Micro.blog timeline. Hope this isn’t an anomaly and @manton has put some fixes around this. If so, looks like they are working 👍🏽

Less than 24-hours away from the Apple event and we still haven’t seen any credible hardware leaks of actual devices. All we have is hearsay mock-ups. Either Apple’s cracked the secret to keep the supply chain silent or it’s going to be bumpy few week full of brickbats for them.

Why haven’t audiobooks gone more mainstream yet? After so many years of existence, Audible remains the only credible global player. Plus the plans/costs have hardly changed. It’s a vicious circle at this point - it’s too costly for larger adoption and so remains a niche market.

This thread on Quora captures some of the best stories from real people meeting Steve Jobs — some wonderful memories.

You don’t often get close to people like the Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people.

You know what the biggest surprise of any Apple event going ahead will be? An updated iPhone SE. The chances of that happening at this event? Close to zero.

But hey, I can continue to dream, right? #BringBackSE

The games that light plays in darkness always mesmerises me. At times, I am glad that my camera doesn’t have my sight at night.

But what is true today is that not all Chinese phone software is bad. And when it is bad from a Western perspective, it’s often bad for very different reasons than the bad Android skins of the past. Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.

The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.

What Chinese smartphones offer is the feature parity in hardware with high-end devices from well-known brands, like Apple, Samsung, at a price which is affordable to the mainstream market. It is difficult to convince someone to buy an iPhone when all the devices are presented along with their specs. Doesn’t matter then if the software experience is ripped off.

What I feel is troubling though and a thing that gets neglected is the durability of these devices. The maximum life of these is what the warranty is - typically an year. Most often, these devices start failing at performance or battery or overall system level even before it hits that period. And when it does, there always are new cheaper devices to replace them with.

This will never get covered by reviews — because reviewers move on to the new, shiny devices in a week or two. It’s the mainstream that suffers. However, brands that overcome this behaviour outlive ones that fade away sooner.